Expulsion of Palestinians from the Gulf
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The expulsion of Palestinians from the Gulf followed Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990. John Kiriakou, living in the Gulf in the early and mid-1990s, has described having "a front row seat to this whole thing playing out."

The professional class

Before the invasion the middle class across the Gulf, not only in Kuwait, was Palestinian. Palestinians were the doctors, the lawyers, the professors and the bankers, and in Kiriakou's account they "made the economies run."

Arafat's choice

After the ruling family fled into exile in Saudi Arabia and Iraqi troops set about destroying Kuwait, Secretary of State James Baker went to Yasser Arafat, then leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and told him he had to come down on the side of the Kuwaitis. After what Kiriakou describes as very public self-flagellation, Arafat sided with Saddam Hussein.

The expulsion

The consensus among the Gulf royal families, as Kiriakou heard it while living in the region, was that they would expel every Palestinian, and for the most part they did. They were replaced with Filipinos, Bangladeshis and Egyptians, and most recently Syrians. As he puts it, "You don't have to be Palestinian to be a lawyer or a professor or an engineer or a banker."

Consequence

Kiriakou identifies this grudge as the political precondition for Gulf normalisation with Israel: these countries are willing to open diplomatic relations "because they don't mind screwing the Palestinians," something he says Lindsey Graham and Benjamin Netanyahu both understood well.

A parallel expulsion struck Yemen. Yemen held a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council in 1990 and voted against the use-of-force resolution; Saudi Arabia responded by expelling millions of Yemeni workers, and in Kiriakou's assessment the country "has never recovered."

See also

- Yasser Arafat
- Abraham Accords
- Yemen
- Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
